


I Would Scratch These Bricks Away

by dear_monday



Series: As Simple As Faith [4]
Category: Amanda Palmer (Musician), Emilie Autumn (Musician)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-10
Updated: 2012-04-10
Packaged: 2017-11-03 10:29:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/380398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dear_monday/pseuds/dear_monday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amanda hears the news on Sunday, but she doesn't hold her breath. She won't believe it until she's seen it for herself. Not until she's seen them lowering Emilie's body into the ground, not until she's seen the dirt falling on the coffin lid. Not until she's felt the tombstone cool and sure under her fingers.</p><p> </p><p>(Also, a bonus companion mix.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Would Scratch These Bricks Away

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ischa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ischa/gifts).



> **warning for temporary character death.**
> 
>  
> 
> Happy birthday, bb! I am posting this now because a) I might not be around tomorrow morning and b) I got bored with waiting. I suspect you will be the only one who reads this, but I hope you enjoy it ♥ for anyone who's interested and/or hasn't come across these people before, I have prepared helpful and instructive picspams of [Amanda Palmer](http://pseudopatient.livejournal.com/10695.html) and [Emilie Autumn](http://pseudopatient.livejournal.com/12739.html).
> 
>  **Edit!** Now with podfic by [dapatty](http://dapatty.livejournal.com), [here @ LJ](http://dapatty.livejournal.com/89919.html) or [here @ DW](http://dapatty.dreamwidth.org/9664.html).

Amanda hears the news on Sunday, but she doesn't hold her breath. She won't believe it until she's seen it for herself. Not until she's seen them lowering Emilie's body into the ground, not until she's seen the dirt falling on the coffin lid. Not until she's felt the tombstone cool and sure under her fingers.  
  
Emilie has been dead before, and she always comes back. Amanda has learnt to think carefully about every leap of faith she makes.  
  
Amanda swears to herself that she'll think no more of it until she can be sure, but her promises don't mean a thing anymore. That night she dreams of Emilie, cold and hungry under the earth, coughing up grave dirt.

 

~

 

The morning of the funeral is damp and chilly, and as Amanda adjusts her widow's veil in the hall mirror she feels like a soldier. Her reflection eyes her coolly, and she picks up the crimson lipstick from the dresser. The color reminds her of Emilie, of teeth cracking glowing red sugar and the pale apple flesh underneath, tart and sweet and perfect.  
  
Amanda puts the lipstick down again, and reaches for the iridescent beetle-wing black instead. It's a good color for war paint.  
  
The funeral is short, somber and sparsely attended. The priest hurries through his words, anxious to be out of the cold again. Amanda closes her eyes. _Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust._ If only. Her heels sink into the damp, corpse-fed turf, and she pictures Emilie with ghostly columbines and pansies crawling from her empty eye sockets. Amanda feels – unsettled, like the ground is no longer steady under her feet and sky is melting down into the arms of the water. Emilie has been dead before, but never for long enough to hold a funeral.  
  
Amanda doesn't know what to think anymore.  
  
They lay flowers at the pale headstone, lilies with silky-white curling petals and a sweet, waxy scent. Amanda doesn't stay to read the epitaph.  
  


~

 

It rains on Wednesday, cold, grey water streaking down windows and rushing through gutters and slipping through the cracks between paving stones and sinking into rich, dark earth. The bloated clouds match the deep, bruise-colored shadows under Amanda's eyes. She has not been sleeping well. The dreams that haunt her are wild and dense, tangled, and the laughing figure of Amanda's Queen Mab is flame-haired and all too familiar.  
  
Amanda sits at her kitchen table, her coffee forgotten as she watches the sky through the window. She likes her coffee black, sweet as sin. Not tea. Never tea. Tea is what _she_ always drank, and Amanda doesn't like to invoke her through the alchemy of leaves and perfumed steam any more often than she has to.  
  
There are two bedraggled magpies on Amanda's lawn, sharp beaks questing for the worms drawn out by the rain. Two for joy, Amanda thinks to herself. _Whose_ joy, she doesn't know.  
  


~

 

By Friday, Amanda has lost count of how many times she's reminded herself that there was nothing she could have done, that there never was. The words in her head have been worn smooth, like pebbles on a riverbed. When she found Amanda, Emilie was already a war cry of a thing who wore the taint of the slaughterhouse with pride, like a crown. She had already shed her wings to become the patron saint of lost girls, all teeth and claws and blood on the walls. Amanda was not and will never be doctor enough to cure her, engineer enough to fix her.  
  
(Amanda _is_ , however, more than human enough to miss Emilie's two AM phone calls, the songs she liked to sing, the way her voice was both delicate as French lace and quietly deadly as Belladonna. At heart, Amanda is still very much the child who held her own finger in a candle flame just to see what it would feel like and nearly drowned trying to hold her breath under water.)

 

~

 

The next Sunday morning is bright and brittle, bitterly cold, and Amanda starts to wonder if this will be the time Emilie doesn't come back.

 

~

 

Death must be a friend of Emilie's. She creeps through Amanda's dreams like poison ivy, insidious, putting down spreading roots in everything she touches. More than once, Amanda sees her as a pale figure smiling slyly up from under the glassy surface of the river with a spray of flowers clutched in her pale fingers, and waterweed tangling with her hair. The water gives her skin an eldritch, greenish cast, but she's still every bit as sharply, achingly beautiful as Amanda remembers.  
  
Amanda wakes to the scent of wild blossom and tea leaves lingering in the air. Emilie wants something from her, and Amanda doesn't know what.  
  
She needs to pay Emilie's remains one last visit.  
  


~

 

Amanda realizes as soon as she reads the inscription that she should have known. She traces the letters cut into the stone with her fingertips, crouching down in the thick darkness that happens just before dawn. The stone is pale, almost glowing like Emilie's skin always did in the darkness. Amanda half-expects to hear Emilie's cat-like tread on the grass behind her, or see her fingers clawing free of the dirt.  
  
The headstone says simply, _there's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray, love – remember._  
  
And Amanda does. She remembers everything. Emilie's breath ghosting over the nape of her neck, Emilie's fingers curled around a chipped porcelain cup, Emilie's smile in all its glorious, feline cruelty.  
  
She kneels by the grave, and she remembers. And under the earth, dead things begin to stir.

 

~

 

At four o' clock that afternoon, Emilie comes knocking at Amanda's door, pale and regal in the dress she died in. There's grave dirt under her nails and something of the beguiling chill of the earth clinging to her skin.  
  
"Aren't you going to let me in?" she asks, soft and deceptively innocent. "It's time for tea."  
  
The last time Emilie said those four words, Amanda stood by and watched her do what she does best. To this day, Amanda has never seen so much blood on the walls.  
  
Emilie's smile unfurls slowly, smooth as running water. "Think about it," she says. "Just you and me, all alone in this big old house with everything we're angry about."  
  
Amanda lets her in.  
  
  
  
  


 

  
  
01.  
The Violet Hour | The Civil Wars  
 _(instrumental)_  
  
02.

Cosmia | Joanna Newsom _  
can you hear me? will you listen?  
don't come near me, don't go missin'  
and in the lissom light of evenin'  
help me, Cosmia, I'm grieving._  
  
03.  
Dig Ophelia | Rasputina  
 _dig, Ophelia, consider it dug  
flowers, madness and polar bear rug  
here's the water, just ankle deep high  
lay back, relax and look up at the sky._  
  
04.  
The Shape Of Things To Come | Michael Giaccino  
 _(instrumental)_  
  
05.  
Through Ten Walls | Birdeatsbaby  
 _through ten walls you rest alone  
buried shallow under precious stone  
it won't be too long before  
guilty hands come knocking on your door._  
  
06.  
Pearl And The Ghostmaker | Ben Foster  & The Studio Orchestra  
 _(instrumental)_  
  
07.  
Kanashiki Funauta | Yasuharu Takanashi  & Hiromi Mizutani  
 _(instrumental)_  
  
08.  
Girls That Glitter Love The Dark | Hannah Fury  
 _girls that glitter deceive death  
we thread ourselves through innocent flesh  
and then we feign surprise when we see  
that those we love to waste, they seem to be erased._

09.  
Ghost Hunt | Masuda Toshio  
 _(instrumental)_  
  
  
[ _ **.ZIP**_](http://www.mediafire.com/?qsap630htizofgf)


End file.
